'The Women Who Mapped The Stars' on stage at Central Square Theater

Friday

May 4, 2018 at 10:08 AMMay 4, 2018 at 10:09 AM

By Iris Fanger Correspondent

At one point in Joyce Van Dyke’s new play “The Women Who Mapped The Stars,” which is based on events from 1890, one of the characters predicts that “100 years from now women will be paid what men are paid.” It's a line guaranteed for laughs. Who would have believed that women are fighting the same battle more than a century later?

“The Women Who Mapped The Stars,” now running at Central Square Theater, is one of the first offered in the Brit d’Arbeloff Women in Science Production series. It is about five women, dubbed the “computers,” who made startling discoveries in astronomy. However, they were assigned mundane tasks at their work at the Harvard College Observatory and kept in the background.

Despite being given little credit for their creativity, several of them had eureka moments that led to scientific breakthroughs. Like the recent film, “Hidden Figures,” which chronicles the achievements of black female mathematicians working at NASA in the 1960s, Van Dyke brings the Harvard women out of the obscurity of the past.

Van Dyke’s play begins with a dramatic scene when Williamina Fleming (Becca A. Lewis), a recent immigrant and pregnant with her first child, enters the stage in her nightgown searching for her missing husband. The plot jumps ahead to the late 19th century. Mina, now a widow with one child, has been promoted from her job as a housemaid employed in the home of Edward Charles Pickering, to head clerk at Harvard’s Observatory. Pickering is director of the Observatory, but we never find out how Mina made the leap, or anything about the man who gave her the opportunity.

Mina works with Henrietta Swan Leavitt (Sarah Oakes Muirhead), a reclusive but brilliant Radcliffe graduate; Annie Jump Cannon (Sarah Newhouse) with a photographic memory that allows her to remember the thousands of stars she records; and the feisty Antonia Maury (Christine Power), whose aunt, a Draper by marriage, funds the work of Harvard’s male astronomers and these women supporting them. The women work six days a week, only using photographs of the stars. They are barred from looking through the telescopes used by the male scientists, and earn half the salaries of the men.

The outlier-character is Cecilia Payne (Amanda Collins), a British-born woman who arrives at Harvard Observatory in 1923. She serves mostly as the narrator of the considerable amount of exposition that’s needed, and to voice her veneration for this first cohort of women.

Along the way, she reflects on the catch-22 for women of the era. “Can I be who I am?” she demands, and wants a lover-husband and children in addition to a career as an astronomer. Payne will go on to make her own major discovery, and become the first female department head at Harvard, along with marriage and three children.

Van Dyke introduces Payne on stage to the other women in 1900 - the year of Payne’s birth - in a science fiction time-bending scene that allows her to interact with her elders. Later in the play, they pose more questions for a woman seeking a career, warning that she cannot be “too pretty,” “but she cannot be unattractive. They’ll never forgive her” - sentiments as contemporary as tomorrow.

Under the direction of Jessica Ernst, the actors deliver strong, individualized performances, but also function well as a supportive ensemble. The play spreads out over a bare stage, backed by a screen that displays stunning projections (designed by SeifAllah Salotto-Cristobal) of a night-time sky, as if the viewers were seated in an IMAX theater.

However, there are problems with Van Dyke’s play. The decision to keep the men off stage - especially Pickering who runs the show at Harvard Observatory and Arthur Eddington and Henry Norris Russell who discouraged Payne - means there are few scenes of tension. We hear about the obstacles to be overcome, rather than see them enacted.

Van Dyke took on the task of condensing three to four decades into 90 minutes of playing time, along with five important biographies, which tends to make the material seem like a lecture demonstration as much as a drama.

Perhaps the material needs to be written as a novel, or filmed, given the scope of the characters’ achievements and the demands of our era that women be given their due.